Ultrasonic Phased Array Process Tomography System for Multiphase Medium Imaging
Chao Tan, Zhixing Zhang, Hao Liu, R. Fu, Guide Yang, Feng Dong
Abstract
Ultrasonic process tomography (UPT) has great application potential in multiphase flow online monitoring due to its non-invasive, radiation-free and visualization features. Existing UPTs with individual transducers suffer from the small number of projection data, which results in low imaging accuracy. This paper presents a novel modular and scalable UPT system, i.e. an ultrasonic phased array tomography (UPAT) system in a digital and modular design, which includes a master control board and up to eight 16-channel ultrasound transceiver boards that are capable of expanding to 128-channel ultrasound transceivers. The beamformers on each transceiver board can flexibly synthesize the sound beams with adjustable shape and direction, while parallelly collecting and processing 16-channel ultrasound signals. To deal with high amount data transmission, the serial rapid IO (SRIO) data exchange protocol with a maximum bandwidth of 4Gbps is applied between the master board and the transceiver boards. Static imaging experiments with a novel tomographic sensing strategy validates the system performance, where the size and location of complex inclusion distribution are reconstructed at a high spatial resolution. The results show that this UPAT system meets the requirements of multiphase flow online monitoring.